Women to Watch in NY tech

Juliet de Baubigny helped build the executive teams at some of New York City's most celebrated startups, all part of venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins' portfolio: Rent the Runway, R&D/manufacturing firm Quirky and the Manhattan arm of music-discovery firm Shazam.

Before joining Kleiner Perkins, Ms. de Baubigny, 44, made a name for herself recruiting board and management-level talent for Web 1.0 companies like eBay and Priceline. The part-time resident of the city is now at the forefront of efforts to mentor and develop young design experts for Kleiner Perkins, a Silicon Valley pioneer making notable bets in New York's tech scene. Design talent will play a central role in “the big industries that are going to be disrupted and enhanced by technology, many of which call New York home—advertising, fashion, commerce, financial tech,” said Anand Sanwal, CEO of CB Insights, a VC database.

Ms. de Baubigny is known for organizing small dinners in the city for entrepreneurs and portfolio companies, at which the conversation centers on design innovation. It's an area where New York “has a really interesting edge over the rest of the world,” said Ms. de Baubigny, citing the city's convergence of art, design, media and fashion.

—Maggie Overfelt

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Courtesy of Lulu

CEO, Lulu

In the same way that Facebook as a startup went viral through college campuses, Lulu, a mobile app founded by former pro tennis player Alexandra Chong, 32, has spread like wildfire since launching at Florida State University and the University of Florida in early 2013. The speed of adoption of her app, which allows women to rate their male Facebook friends as dates, makes Ms. Chong a woman to watch, with a big acquisition of her company a possible outcome.

According to Ms. Chong, one in four college women in the U.S. already use Lulu. Men have to agree to be listed on the site, however.

“She has struck a vein in the community by providing an app that empowers women with a knowledge advantage,” said Bill Tai, an investor in Lulu, which has collected about $3.5 million in angel funding and has 15 employees in the Flatiron district.

Ms. Chong moved her startup from London to New York to tap into what she called the “Sex and the City movement”: “The aspirational woman is a New York woman,” she said. Later this year, Lulu will launch versions likely centered around beauty, health and careers—potential ad-revenue-making verticals. “Lulu is this ecosystem where women share everything and anything that's important to them,” said Ms. Chong.

—Maggie Overfelt

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Courtesy of Cornell

Founder, Open mHealth

Big data may be the mantra of the moment, but Deborah Estrin is at the leading edge of another movement: small data. She examines the digital traces of our lives that mobile phones and other devices can increasingly track, measure and analyze—from pulse rates to shopping habits to chronic pain.

A professor of public health at Weill Cornell Medical College and Cornell Tech, Ms. Estrin, 54, is a pioneer in this growing field, which promises to transform how we understand health and behavior. Her Small Data Lab is developing applications to help people glean their own small data from mobile carriers, search engines and social-networking sites, and use that information to manage their lives.

Her nonprofit startup, Open mHealth, provides open software for other tech companies to build applications, such as one that is helping diabetics integrate data from diet, physical activity and blood-glucose levels into a single stream for quick and informed decision making.

Small data has possibilities that are yet to be imagined, but what excites Ms. Estrin is the here and now.

“What's interesting is the extent to which our lives are continuously digitized [so that we can] build detailed models of ourselves and apply them,” she said.

—Judith Messina

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Courtesy of Ben Horowitz

Managing partner, High Line Venture Partners

Known for being able to spot winning companies when others barely know they exist, Shana Fisher is a publicity-shy angel investor who put money early into standouts such as Pinterest, MakerBot and Refinery29. Where she will be putting money this year is anyone's guess—but her picks may prove to be some of New York's next big winners. One favorite sector for Ms. Fisher has been fashion. Other recent picks have been in crowdfunding and social media.

Brooklyn Bridge Ventures founder Charlie O'Donnell called her his "VC hero," and A-list venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose board she recently joined, described her as combining "the street smarts of how to build companies with the book smarts of how to invest in them."

After a stint at Microsoft, Ms. Fisher, who is in her early 40s, joined Allen & Co. and later headed mergers and acquisitions at IAC. Three years ago, she started High Line to invest in early-stage companies. She told Andreessen Horowitz's Ben Horowitz last year that she tries "to understand what great entrepreneurs have in them, and I look for the ones who have it, and then I do what I can to help them realize their greatness."

—Judith Messina

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Buck Ennis

Vice president for strategic partnerships, North and South America, Google

A veteran marketer and one of the highest-ranking women in Google's New York operation, Bonita Coleman Stewart, 56, helps drive revenue for the tech behemoth's brands and partners, making sure its search engine and other services are working for publishers trying to reach trying to reach huge advertisers such as car companies and financial-service firms. Now she has the giant challenge of managing the transition to mobile for those giant companies and their campaigns. Can she help Google and its partners—companies such as Condé Nast, ESPN and CBS Interactive—adapt to the mobile world to reach consumers across numerous devices and screens?

A Harvard M.B.A., Ms. Stewart started in brand management at IBM and later moved to DaimlerChrysler AG, where she headed Chrysler Group interactive communications and Chrysler brand advertising. Today, at Google, she lives and breathes technology. "I'm a walking lab," said Ms. Stewart. "It's important to be able to showcase the technology and give a glimpse into the future." And yes, she uses Google Glass, for navigation, keeping up with the news and taking pictures—with the subjects' permission, of course.

—Judith Messina

Correction: Bonita Coleman Stewart is one of several female vice presidents at the Google New York City operation and heads the Google team that works with large publisher partners. Those facts were misstated in an earlier version of this article originally published online May 19, 2014.

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Associated Press

CEO, IBM

Virginia Rometty is the first woman to lead iconic tech giant IBM, and, for that matter, only one of 47 women heading Fortune 1000 companies.

With $100 billion in annual revenue, IBM remains one of the world's biggest technology companies, but sales slid 5% last year as it grappled with the rapidly shifting tech landscape.

Can Ms. Rometty, 56, engineer a comeback and make IBM, which has more than 400,000 employees worldwide, an A-lister in the new tech world?

First-quarter revenue this year hit a five-year low, another sign that buying expensive hardware is passé and businesses are renting their computing power more and more from the cloud.

In January, Ms. Rometty nixed her own bonus, signaling her responsibility for the company's faltering revenue and for the hard work ahead. She has laid off employees, unloaded IBM's server business and invested in a new Watson analytic unit.

One indication that her efforts are making a difference: The company's cloud revenue was up 50% in the first quarter.

—Judith Messina

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CEO, Artspace

By making art as easy to buy as a book on Amazon, Catherine Levene is creating a new market of contemporary collectors. With a credit card and a few clicks, any buyer can pick up a reproduction Robert Mapplethorpe plate for $47 or a photograph of Mikhail Baryshnikov for $1,000. A $186,820 sculpture by Arik Levy takes more than a credit card but it, too, can be bought on the Artspace site.

After three years of growing sales, Ms. Levene, 44, has turned skeptics, who didn't believe art could be sold online at all, into believers. Now the big question is whether she can outdeliver a small but growing list of Internet competitors—not to mention big outfits like Christie's.

Her plans include more international transactions and selective sales of art online from collectors who are unloading their works.

“The word 'curate' is very important for us,” she said. “We really want to make sure that the quality of the artworks on our site remains stellar.”

An Internet veteran, Ms. Levene worked at Find.com, Daily Candy and New York Times Digital before starting Artspace in 2010 with partner Christopher Vroom and $1.2 million in friends-and-family money. The company has 28 employees, and has sold art to collectors in every state and 20 countries.

—Judith Messina

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Buck Ennis

CEO, AOL Brand Group

Susan Lyne, the former chief of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia whose most recent CEO gig was managing two years of unbridled growth at flash-sale site Gilt, says returning to media to help revamp a tired Web 1.0 firm was a challenge she couldn't refuse.

"It's an exciting moment for [online] content—there are so many new platforms that allow for creative expression," she said. Since Ms. Lyne, 64, was appointed head of AOL's Brand Group in early 2013, its properties, including TechCrunch, have grown dramatically. Increases in premium advertising and secondary revenue streams, such as additional conferences, have helped draw in more readers.

Up next: scouting a new breed of partners such as device makers and other media companies so AOL can "push content to people instead of expecting them to come to us," said Ms. Lyne. She holds quarterly breakfasts for women entrepreneurs, a project she hosts with Gilt CEO Michelle Peluso.

"Young female entrepreneurs are so inspired by Susan," said Nick Beim, a partner at VC firm Venrock with a history of investing in female-led upstarts. "It's part of her character to mentor others."

—Maggie Overfelt

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Courtesy of Modalyst

CEO, Modalyst

The fashion-buying world is glamorous, but for Jill Sherman, a former buyer for luxury department store Harvey Nichols, it's also inefficient.

"You find designers from around the world only to find that the next year they haven't survived," said Ms. Sherman, 35. "[Retailers] are also forced to buy six months in advance, before knowing the trends of the season."

Ms. Sherman's B2B startup, Modalyst—which she launched in January 2013 after meeting her business partner, Alain Miguel, at MIT—has enabled more than 3,000 boutiques and 250 designers worldwide to connect in ways previously exclusive to large department stores and known brands. The Manhattan-based company, with eight employees, has a platform that makes it possible for independent retailers to receive bulk-order discounts and gives them more ability to test different brands and products while they share the financial risk with others.

The company plans to expand from fashion into other product categories—Ms. Sherman won't say which—and hopes to raise another round of funding this summer. "I like the opportunity for young designers and companies to have a platform on which to present and communicate to retailers," said fashion-market analyst Abbey Doneger.

—Maggie Overfelt

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Buck Ennis

Founder and CEO, Snaps

Vivian Rosenthal is a master builder in the city's growing high-tech augmented-reality scene, which lets customers mash up photos on their mobile devices with brand-supplied images.

The Columbia-trained architect, 38, is the founder of Snaps, an 11-employee augmented-reality marketing firm with just under $1 million in revenue in 2013. Ms. Rosenthal's company allows for an easy mix of digital content with photos that consumers capture on their cellphones.

The likes of Kate Spade, the Pet Shop Boys and NBC have hired Snaps, and 2014 is shaping up to be a big year. Facebook's $2 billion purchase of Oculus Rift's virtual-reality head-mounted system raised the profile of augmented-reality services, and Snaps is one of New York's most credible players.

Ms. Rosenthal, who has raised $3 million to date from angel backers including Jeremy Zimmer, co-founder of United Talent Agency, and Ben Barokas, general manager of Google's global marketing development, is in the midst of another round of fundraising.

Karin Klein heads East Coast investment activity for Bloomberg LP's widely watched $75 million Bloomberg Beta venture fund, launched last year. The fund is likely to be a key player in the New York-centric industries of data and media that are aligned with Bloomberg's interests. (The fund explicitly does not invest in financial services.)

In the notoriously closed world of VC funding, Ms. Klein, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 and who is a former vice president at SoftBank's venture fund, is leading the firm's push to “approach venture capital in a new way,” she said. Bloomberg Beta has openly published its deal terms on code-hosting site GitHub and is using analytical tools and research provided partly by data company Mattermark to comb through tech firms across the U.S. for 350 employees who possess the traits of those most likely to become startup founders.

“Bloomberg Beta is trying to build a different type of VC firm, one that's entirely open,” said Zach Sims, CEO and co-founder of online coding tutorial Codecademy. “Karin has a sharp eye for companies with great prospects.”

Bloomberg Beta's New York portfolio includes Codecademy and cloud-developer platform Nodejitsu, two of the city's most promising startups.

—Maggie Overfelt

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Courtesy of Kaltura

President and co-founder, Kaltura

With a doctorate in game theory and law from NYU, Michal Tsur always thought she'd be an academic. But then a friend asked her to join him in founding an Internet company.

Six years later, in 2005, they sold their anti-fraud startup, Cyota, to RSA Security for $145 million. Her current company, Kaltura, is shaping up to be a bigger win. Ms. Tsur, 41, has helped turn it into an open-source video platform used by 300,000 media companies, websites, schools and businesses, including ABC, Harvard and Bank of America. They use Kaltura's tools to publish, host, manage and analyze video content.

Since the company's founding in 2006, it has raised $115 million, including $47 million three months ago. Annual revenue is more than $50 million, and it expects to double its 200-employee workforce this year, opening an office in Singapore and adding to its operations in New York, London, Israel and Brazil.

Widely seen as a likely IPO candidate in the next year or so, Kaltura would be one of the few New York tech companies co-founded by a woman to go public.

Ms. Tsur realizes now that she wouldn't have enjoyed being a full-time academic. "In terms of impact, you write a law-review article, and it gets shared a few times," she said. "You write a blog post, and it gets shared 100,000 times."

—Judith Messina

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Courtesy of Partner Jalia Ventures

Venture partner, Core Innovation Capital

The question of why there are so few African-Americans and Hispanics in New York's burgeoning tech scene is only beginning to be asked. If anyone could answer it--and maybechange the picture—it might be Kathleen Utecht.

"They are every definition of what an entrepreneur shouldbe," said Ms. Utecht of those she's bankrolled, who include the founders of companies such as Maker's Row and Viridis. "They had to do so much to get there."

Ms. Utecht spent two years as an entrepreneur in residence with Comcast Ventures' Catalyst Fund, which is dedicated to making seed investments in minority founded enterprises, and later with Jalia Ventures, which funds minority entrepreneurs who have business/social missions.

Now a venture partner at Core Innovation Capital, which Invests in financial technology that helps low and moderate-income consumers, Ms. Utecht, 32, also invests on her ownand recently took a stake in investment research site Track.com.

"You won't see me investing in another brand or e-commerce site," she said. "The companies I've invested in tend to solve bigger world issues and problems, not just [build] another app."

Ms. Utecht became an investor after selling her company,game maker Green Rock Entertainment, to private-equityfirm Innovate Partners in 2009.

—Judith Messina

Correction: Kathleen Utecht is a venture partner at Core Innovation Capital. The name of the firm was misstated in an earlier version of this article originally published online May 19, 2014.

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Courtesy of Infor

Chief financial officer, Infor

The most empowering business advice Nicole Anasenes ever got was from a senior executive at IBM, who told her not to be afraid to interrogate “the techies” if she didn't understand something.

“You become accustomed to politely forcing them to explain things in simple English,” said Ms. Anasenes, 41, who says she needs to understand so she can make sure that the company's resources are driving the right—and high—levels of growth.

It was a tough lesson, but it has served her well, first as chief financial officer of the middleware division of IBM's Software Group, and since November as CFO of Infor, a software firm that serves 70,000 business customers in 200 countries and territories. It has 79 full-time employees in New York City, and with $2.8 billion in revenue, is the largest enterprise software company headquartered here.

Ms. Anasenes is a key figure in Infor's expansion ambitions, helping to drive its UpgradeX program to migrate customers to the cloud, among other projects. Quarterly revenue at Infor, whose largest shareholder is private-equity firm Golden Gate Capital, is growing at rates in the double digits.

—Judith Messina

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Founder and CEO, Girls Who Code

Unusual in New York, Reshma Saujani is a technology figure who also has political and policy ambitions. As a 37-year-old, she ran for public advocate and lost in 2013. She's very much on the radar both because she will likely try again, and because of the way her Girls Who Code program, which teaches programming and other computer skills to girls in low-income communities, is breaking ground in New York and elsewhere.

"I will run for office again," Ms. Saujani recently told a CUNY interviewer. "But right now ... I want to see how much change I can bring outside of the system."

Ms. Saujani wants to reverse the decline of women in computer-related professions. Her book, Women Who Don't Wait in Line, encourages women to take risks and mentor each other.

The nonprofit Girls Who Code, founded in 2012, trained 180 girls last year. From one immersion program in New York City, it has expanded to eight in five cities in just two years, and Ms. Saujani has set her sights on educating 1 million girls in the United States in computer science and technology by 2020.

—Judith Messina

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Courtesy of Greycroft

Principal, Greycroft Partners

If women are a rarity in venture capital, young women are even rarer. Ellie Wheeler, 31, is the exception that proves that rule.

Last fall, she was named a principal of Greycroft, an early-stage venture fund founded by Alan Patricof and known for savvy bets on such entities as Buddy Media and The Huffington Post.

Now the question is whether her picks can deliver returns.

At Greycroft Partners since 2011, Ms. Wheeler has already led five investments—way more than the one or two of the typical early hire—including stakes in popular e-commerce jewelry seller BaubleBar, rewards program Buzz Points and mobile gaming site Plain Vanilla.

Before joining Greycroft, Ms. Wheeler honed her skills at firms such as Summit Partners in Boston, Lowercase Capital in Truckee, Calif., and DN Capital in London, as well as at Cisco Systems, where she did M&A and venture investing.

"She has a bunch of companies that are performing great, and the sky's the limit," said Ian Sigalow, a Greycroft partner and co-founder.

—Judith Messina

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